Music

05/19/2010

I've been thinking a lot about covers lately. When I was a kid I
used to listen to music a lot with my mom, who was partial to female
vocalists and musicians. It was important for me to know whether the
person performing had written the song or not. I saw the artist as
somehow diminished if she did not write the song she was singing. It seemed to me as a
child in the seventies that if I could sing someone else's song with
some amount of conviction, that I should expect a bit more from the
ladies I was listening to.

However, I've recently
developed a new appreciation for interpretation of another's song. I
usually want to learn a song because I fall in love with it. I am so in
love with it, and with the version I'm familiar with, that I cannot
imagine a new way to do it. I just want to replicate what I've heard.
And this is always a disappointing exercise. Add to this that it's
virtually impossible for me to let go of my preconceived notions of
particular kinds of songs and genres of music enough to understand when a
song might benefit from another view. I am thinking of "Don't want to miss a thing," which most of us know by
Aerosmith. Now, I don't want to be mean to Aerosmith. I've enjoyed them,
but never with any amount of seriousness--just as a kind of lark, I
guess. It's good fun to try to open one's mouth as wide as Steve
Tyler's. And who, from my generation, doesn't have fond memories of
school dances and Run DMC's version of "Walk this way"? But I never
thought that they had songs that were actually "good." I always just
listened to them with the kind of irony someone with my aesthetic brings
to heavy metal or a seventh grade boyfriend--it was fun we've had a lot
of laughs, you make me feel nostalgic, but I've got bigger, more earnest fish to fry.

Then
came Pomplemoose's completely fetching version of "Don't want to miss a
thing," which--now bear with me here--reveals this song as having the
same kind of charm as an old standard. Without the full hard-rock intensity, it's a simple, honest
statement of feeling--especially the chorus. And it's stripped of that silly harmony. Nataly Dawn's voice is so plaintive and sweet, and
her mouth is so much smaller than Steven Tyler's that you won't be as
distracted by her teeth. I'm not fully on board with all the effects
they use--some seem like overkill, but I do dig the bridge. And I have such a new appreciation for
this little ditty. It's been stuck in my head for weeks. And just try
to resist getting lost in Nataly Dawn's eyes.

04/26/2010

My parents were folkees and played
loads of music when I was growing up. So I seem to have either a gift
or a curse for memorizing lyrics. Sometimes this is lovely. I am a
fairly capable singer and love to sing along with my favorites and even
my not-so-favorites. I am a closet performer. A shower singer.

Sometimes, though, it's downright
alarming. The other day a particularly bad song came on the radio as
my husband and I were out driving in Costa Rica. It
was REO Speedwagon. It was actually REO Speedwagon past prime. I
remember hating it when it was on the radio, but taking particular
glee in mocking the lyrics. The problem with remembering the lyrics
to bad songs is that they ramble around in your head long after the song
has ended. In fact, sometimes one needn't hear the song at all, just
a bar or so or a couple of words that sound like the song. But I want to really make sure you really understand this particular kind of misery. So, my dear
readers, I leave you with this gift. Pass it on, if you like....

04/24/2010

Those of you who know me know that I'm
well, a bit of an Elliott Smith fan (ahem) to say the least. He's my favorite songwriter. If I think about that too much I'll
start second guessing myself, but there's no one else whose music
I've listened to as intensely as his. He had a fantastic sense of
language (billions of little quotable lines) and a superlative sense
of melody and he wasn't lazy about neither of 'em.
That's clear enough from the number of different versions there are
floating around of songs like Miss Misery. He worked hard. He did a
lot of drugs, yes, but he worked hard and he listened very carefully to a lot of different things.

Heatmiser
was his first semi-famous band—kind of post punk rock and roll. That's what was
popular in those days, but apparently Elliott wasn't feeling it, which is
why he started his own side projects. These were categorized as "folk punk" and later "alternative." But when you
listen his stuff and when you read about his background, you realize that there's a whole lot more to the music than that. There's the Beatles component, yes (yawn, we always hear about that),
but there's also a little barber shop quartet by way of his
grandmother, some flamenco and a little country among many other things I'm sure. The guy was a musical sponge.

My own musical tastes are pretty eclectic. More
eclectic than I'd like to admit, perhaps. I don't think I'm alone in this by any means. It's easy to cop to your
high school affinity for bands like The Alarm, not so easy, perhaps,
to admit that you love the music from Godspell, because you used to
dance around to it in the living room wielding a dish towel like a
feather boa. But perhaps that's a story for another time. So, after all the aesthetic
debates are over, after we find our appropriate and useful marketing
categories, after we've
dismissed some of these as not suitable for consumption, we still (hopefully)
like what we like, in spite of ourselves. Kind of like we like Pringles, even
though they're over-processsed and bad for our hearts. But it's far less harmful to our systems to listen to the stuff that
we like that may not have received the critical stamp of approval. In
fact, it may even be good for you. Barriers are nothing but
bad for creativity. After all, without such diversions, we wouldn't
have this little gem....